Geography jobs at the U.S. Department of State

Update: Both jobs have been filled (21 Sept 2013)

The Jobs

Available immediately, the U.S Department of State is looking to fill two positions related to geographic analysis and geographic programming. The Office of eDiplomacy, the State Department’s knowledge management gurus, want to build a first-rate geographic application development team. The two-person team will work with DoS bureaus to understand their workflows, leverage the geographic components of their data, and build custom geographic applications to help them. The team will be composed of one GIS applications developer, and one GIS analyst. Each position will require a substantial overlap in skills, meaning the developer must understand GIS analysis and the analyst will have to have some programming experience.

In that capacity, I started a project to build a completely open source geographic computing infrastructure focused on humanitarian applications. Called the CyberGIS, this project is built exclusively from open source geographic technology including, PostGIS/PostgreSQL, GeoServer, TileCache, OpenLayers, and TileMill, along with the standard Ubuntu, Apache, Tomcat, jQuery components, and we host our production environment in Amazon Web Services. Using the term CyberGIS was intentional and intended to place the project inline with on-going efforts in the academic community to unite the worlds of geographic information science and cyberinfrastructure.

We have used this infrastructure to build several HIU geographic web applications, including the Imagery to the Crowd projects. These award winning projects are just the beginning for the CyberGIS at the HIU, we have several applications under development that we hope to unveil publicly in the coming months. The success of the HIU CyberGIS has raised the attention of geography in the Department, and the fact that eDiplomacy is building this development team is a huge step in expanding the power of Geography to the entire State Department. Two years ago I could not have expected that we could move this far this fast, and now we have an opportunity to fundamentally influence how the Department operates.

The Ask

If you have serious GIS analysis and open source geographic developer skills and want to be part of a geographic revolution, then I encourage you to apply. We need forward leaning, capable folks who fundamentally understand spatial analysis and geographic technololgy. You must be willing to work hard and be leaders in showing how geographic data and analysis can improve American diplomacy. This is a unique moment and we need the right team.